In my posting absence

I've been remiss in posting for almost a month. In my posting absence ...

Kitchen window rocking spot

Range, teapot, jars and loom

Place to rest my head

Place to curl up

Shelves

I've moved and settled with the help and generosity of several friends as well as my Aunt Jani and Uncle Louis. With all their help, I have outfited my tiny two-room nest with everything from silverware to seating.

After several deep-dive cleaning extravaganzas, it's really starting to feel (and smell) like home ...

Two summer's ago, I was enrolled in a Virginia Woolf seminar at Bread Loaf School of English. On the first day, we discussed Woolf's hints of home in her writing and our own definitions. I said that home was a place with big shelves where I could keep my books. Thanks to Louis and Jani, I now have the shelves. And they have space to spare.

Revisiting an old haunt

I know Vermont best in the summer when I study at the Bread Loaf School English. The landscape is lush — verdant mountains, fields sprinkled with Indian paintbrush flowers, dark green mosses covering the rocks along the rivers, wide clearings with tiny flavor-packed low-bush blueberries. I wake up with the sun and get out of bed without hesitation. I go for a long walk almost every morning. 

I wanted to revisit the Robert Frost Trail in fall to see how I felt. I thought I might feel unwelcome, like arriving early to a party and finding the host not fully dressed.

Here's what I saw.

Rather than unwelcome, I felt an intimacy with the place. I know it dressed up in summer splendor and stripped down to rock and branch. Both beautiful.

Frost's October

I'm thinking of Robert Frost's poem "October."

It starts,

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

[...]

This hush has permeated my being. I've been sleeping more, sending letters, taking long slow walks, appreciating the filtered sunlight.

Late, but just in time

Last weekend, I drove 1,400 miles round trip (between Friday night and early Monday morning).

I worked until 8 p.m. Friday and immediately got on the road to drive four hours south so that I would have a manageable five hour drive to Gettysburg the next morning, and arrive with an hour to spare for the wedding ceremony of my grad school friends.

Everything went as planned (aside from the scary motel room next door to a group of bikers) until I drove through a small town about 45 miles from Gettysburg. At a stoplight I decided to be good and not take my left turn on the yellow.

The light turned red and a old man in a bright orange safety vest marched out from the sidewalk and placed an orange traffic cone in front of my car. He then walked up to my window and knocked.

"Dear, you're going to have to wait a few minutes. There's a parade coming through," he said when I rolled down my window.

The light changed three times; nothing happened.

And then I saw an ant-like army coming over a distant hill. As the parade moved closer I heard the honks and saw the POW flags. Turns out, the parade of motorcycles took five minutes to pass and I would follow it all the way to Gettysburg.

I arrived at the church a half hour after the ceremony started instead of the planned hour ahead of time. I did get there in time for the vows, which I heard thanks to the somewhat unnerving presence of a speaker installed in the bathroom. (I had been holding my bladder for the final leg of the journey so as not to lose any more time.)

After the dinner, and a quick conversation with the newlyweds, I drove the four hours to Pittsburgh. I spent the night with my sister Claire and the furry Leo. The next day we did some shopping in an old grocery district of the city, ate breakfast at a Jewish deli and visited Claire's sky-lighted office at Carnegie Mellon, where she now teaches.

The visit was too short, but knowing that I had to get back for work, I loaded up the car with all my things Claire had moved from Missouri (including winter coats, and less useful items like a table loom and a box of my childhood dolls).

I drove 12 hours straight and arrived in Burlington at 1 a.m., so exhausted that I actually walked into a wall in my apartment.

Although I worked a full week, I've had little energy for anything extra (aside from yoga classes which helped loosen my stiff neck). I slept 14 hours from Friday to Saturday afternoon. I feel pretty good this morning and happily return to my blog posting.

Reconnecting and remembering

I've been away for yet another weekend — went across Lake Champlain to spend the night at my aunt and uncle's house. My cousin, who's close to my age, was visiting from Austin. We had played together as children, but I hadn't seen her in a few years. She and I went for a hike up Coon Mountain which we had done together before, a long time ago.

View from the top of Coon Mountain.

Then, the whole family went out to dinner. When we got home, no one was ready for bed. We settled in front of the fireplace for what turned out to be a very late night of remembering shared experiences and filling each other in on the paths we've taken since.

Getting installed

I love my one-bedroom corner apartment with seven-foot-tall windows, but haven't spent much time at home.

A series of trips have taken me away from Burlington throughout the month of August. I've spent time in Rochester and  Essex, N.Y., Putney and Middlebury, Vt., and most recently Quebec.

In anticipation of visitors coming to see me over the next weeks, I hunkered down in Burlington to rest and get a more acquainted with the city where I now live. The timing couldn't have been better because Burlington's South End Art Hop was taking place. The waterfront neighborhood's seemingly defunct warehouses are actually divided into a surprising number of studios, workshops (even a small artisan bagel shop) and sprawling antique stores. For the celebration, the maze of  studios and workshops were opened to the public, bands played, food vendors filled the street and a Ben & Jerry's truck gave away free ice cream.

Here's a picture of me in an installation art exhibit.

Art Hop also spilled over on the central part of Burlington's Waterfront. Overnight, an impressive number of rock sculptures appeared on Lake Champlain's embankment.

I remember

Je me souviens (I remember) appears on all the license plates in Quebec. My Uncle Louis pointed out the motto and translated the words for me while we were driving to our family's ancestral farmlands in the central Quebec municipality of Bécancour over Labor Day weekend. 

He suggested that we, along with our Montreal-based second cousin who came too, were enacting this motto. I thought his suggestion wasn't quite accurate, for me at least, as I'd never been there. I had nothing to remember. I drove on.

Although the farmhouse where my grandmother grew up burned down a number of years ago and none of us knew where my grandfather's farm even was, we did find plenty of hints from the past. 

We spent the day sightseeing the Catholic churches and cemeteries of the towns where my grandparents grew up, visiting our last remaining relative in my grandmother's town of St. Sylvere and eating Belgian-chocolate dipped ice creams the size of our heads. We even weaseled our way onto the farm where my grandmother grew up by buying eggs from the elderly farmer who now lives there. He took us around to see the chickens, goats and sheep.  

I took the opportunity to photograph the barns that are still standing.

As we drove back to Montreal at the end of the day, I felt like I had a fuller understanding of who my grandparents were and what kind of legacy they have passed down tho their children and grandchildren. A legacy of simple living, hard work and commitment to family. I come from a family of good and honest people. My mind wandered back the "I remember" motto. Now, I do.